Saturday, July 11, 2015

Blatant Theft.

For some years now I have been a contributor to a website
called morguefile.com . It was started by two brothers in America as a
memorial to their parents who were ‘special needs’ teachers. Pictures on the
site can be used royalty free for almost any purpose except as stand alone
images for sale.

I liked the idea and have put JPGs over when I can, my
thought being that when I am gone, there will still be little bits of me floating
around all over the world. I am now getting closer to half a million downloads
of my work, and hope that by the end of the year I might reach that figure.

Now let me tell you a little tip. If you contribute pictures
to a website and wish to know about their use, right click on a picture and
then select “Search Google for this image”

Within moments Google will return to you with a reply. Such
is the wonder of the ‘net’. It won’t tell you every use but only the ones that
are on the internet itself.

I often look like that to see what is going on. Agents on
other sites that sell pictures frequently copy over free work from Morguefile as
tempters to get folk to dig into the site for work they must pay for. This is
fair enough they are nor charging for the free ones. I was amazed though to
find on a website called Mineshots.com that one of their contributors had stolen many
of my JPGs and loaded them there as his own work. As far as I am concerned this
is downright theft and that contributor is a liar.

I have made comments on his page but can find no way to contact
the site owners, there is no Email address link. All I can do is to put
comments on any of my pictures that the thief has posted as his own. Like the following
one that alerted me in the first place. I have now by looking through his pages
found almost 20 stolen pictures and I am less than a quarter way through. The picture used as the header on this blog, was one of them.